Films for the love of Earth
Two new documentaries that mix doomsaying with optimism
Two new enviro-docs are getting a limited release in June. Metamorphosis, directed by the husband-and-wife team of Velcrow Ripper (Scared Sacred) and Nova Ami, starts off beautiful but depressing, with sculptures of human forms that suggest a future Ozymandias, as someone predicts that nature will still be around in the future; it’s just the parts we need to survive that won’t work any more.
But eventually the film turns to people who are addressing the needs of the planet, whether by turning abandoned Californian swimming pools into self-sustaining micro-farms, erecting “vertical forest buildings” in Milan, or constructing Earth Houses out of materials that would otherwise go into landfills. It’s enough to swing the mood over to something like hope.
Also maintaining a cautious balance between doomsaying and optimism is Earth: Seen from the Heart (3.5 out of 5 stars), directed by Montreal filmmaker Iolande Cadrin-Rossignol. It opens and closes on an interview with Hubert Reeves, a Canadian astrophysicist who has given much thought to the universe and our place in it.
The intervening 90 minutes introduces philosophers, oceanographers, biologists and activists discussing the dangers we face as the cause and possible victim of Earth’s sixth mass extinction. (The fifth took out the dinosaurs.)
But this survey of our Holocene Age also takes a page from Winston Churchill’s reaction to the rise of fascism.
“I see great reason for intense vigilance and exertion,” Churchill said in 1940. “None whatever for panic or despair.”